Google | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Signaling a major shift to its ads-driven business model, Google on Wednesday unequivocally stated it would not build alternate identifiers or tools to track users across multiple websites once it begins phasing out third-party tracking cookies from its Chrome browser by early 2022. "Instead, our web products will be powered by privacy-preserving APIs which prevent individual tracking while still delivering results for advertisers and publishers,"  said  David Temkin, Google's director of product management for ads privacy and trust. "Advances in aggregation, anonymization, on-device processing and other privacy-preserving technologies offer a clear path to replacing individual identifiers." The changes, which could potentially reshape the advertising landscape, are expected only to cover websites visited via Chrome and do not extend to mobile apps. At the same time, Google acknowledged that other companies might find alternative ways to track individual us

Apple's upcoming iOS 14.5 update will come with a new feature that will redirect all fraudulent website checks through its own proxy servers as a workaround to preserve user privacy and prevent leaking IP addresses to Google. A built-in security-focused feature in the Safari browser, " Fraudulent Website Warning ," alerts users about dangerous websites that have been reported as deceptive, malicious, or harmful. To achieve this, Apple relies on  Google Safe Browsing  — or Tencent Safe Browsing for users in Mainland China — a blocklist service that provides a list of URLs for web resources that contain malware or phishing content, to compare a hash prefix calculated from the website address and check if the website is fraudulent. Any match against the database will prompt Safari to request Google or Tencent for the full list of URLs that correspond to the hashed prefix and subsequently block a user's access to the site with a warning. While the approach ensures t

Imagine a world where the software that powers your favorite apps, secures your online transactions, and keeps your digital life could be outsmarted and taken over by a cleverly disguised piece of code. This isn't a plot from the latest cyber-thriller; it's actually been a reality for years now. How this will change – in a positive or negative direction – as artificial intelligence (AI) takes on a larger role in software development is one of the big uncertainties related to this brave new world. In an era where AI promises to revolutionize how we live and work, the conversation about its security implications cannot be sidelined. As we increasingly rely on AI for tasks ranging from mundane to mission-critical, the question is no longer just, "Can AI  boost cybersecurity ?" (sure!), but also "Can AI  be hacked? " (yes!), "Can one use AI  to hack? " (of course!), and "Will AI  produce secure software ?" (well…). This thought leadership article is about the latter. Cydrill  (a

Google has patched a zero-day vulnerability in Chrome web browser for desktop that it says is being actively exploited in the wild. The company released  88.0.4324.150  for Windows, Mac, and Linux, with a fix for a heap buffer overflow flaw (CVE-2021-21148) in its V8 JavaScript rendering engine. "Google is aware of reports that an exploit for CVE-2021-21148 exists in the wild," the company said in a statement. The security flaw was reported to Google by Mattias Buelens on January 24. Previously on February 2, Google  addressed six issues in Chrome , including one critical use after free vulnerability in Payments (CVE-2021-21142) and four high severity flaws in Extensions, Tab Groups, Fonts, and Navigation features. While it's typical of Google to limit details of the vulnerability until a majority of users are updated with the fix, the development comes weeks after Google and Microsoft  disclosed  attacks carried out by North Korean hackers against security researc

A "severe" vulnerability in GNU Privacy Guard (GnuPG)'s Libgcrypt encryption software could have allowed an attacker to write arbitrary data to the target machine, potentially leading to remote code execution. The flaw, which affects version 1.9.0 of libgcrypt, was discovered on January 28 by Tavis Ormandy of Project Zero, a security research unit within Google dedicated to finding zero-day bugs in hardware and software systems. No other versions of Libgcrypt are affected by the vulnerability. "There is a  heap buffer overflow  in libgcrypt due to an incorrect assumption in the block buffer management code," Ormandy  said . "Just decrypting some data can overflow a heap buffer with attacker controlled data, no verification or signature is validated before the vulnerability occurs." GnuPG addressed the weakness almost immediately within a day after disclosure, while urging users to  stop using  the vulnerable version. The latest version can be dow

Hardware security keys—such as those from Google and Yubico—are considered the most secure means to protect accounts from phishing and takeover attacks. But a new research published on Thursday demonstrates how an adversary in possession of such a two-factor authentication (2FA) device can clone it by exploiting an electromagnetic side-channel in the chip embedded in it. The vulnerability (tracked as CVE-2021-3011 ) allows the bad actor to extract the encryption key or the  ECDSA  private key linked to a victim's account from a FIDO Universal 2nd Factor (U2F) device like Google Titan Key or YubiKey, thus completely undermining the 2FA protections. "The adversary can sign in to the victim's application account without the U2F device, and without the victim noticing," NinjaLab researchers Victor Lomne and Thomas Roche  said  in a 60-page analysis. "In other words, the adversary created a clone of the U2F device for the victim's application account. This c

A three-year-old attack technique to bypass Google's audio reCAPTCHA by using its own Speech-to-Text API has been found to still work with 97% accuracy. Researcher Nikolai Tschacher disclosed his findings in a proof-of-concept (PoC) of the attack on January 2. "The idea of the attack is very simple: You grab the MP3 file of the audio reCAPTCHA and you submit it to Google's own speech-to-text API," Tschacher  said  in a write-up. "Google will return the correct answer in over 97% of all cases." Introduced in 2000, CAPTCHAs (or Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) are a type of challenge-response tests designed to protect against automated account creation and service abuse by presenting users with a question that is easy for humans to solve but difficult for computers. reCAPTCHA  is a popular version of the CAPTCHA technology that was acquired by Google in 2009. The search giant released the  third iteration  of re

An unpatched security weakness in Google Drive could be exploited by malware attackers to distribute malicious files disguised as legitimate documents or images, enabling bad actors to perform spear-phishing attacks comparatively with a high success rate. The latest security issue—of which Google is aware but, unfortunately, left unpatched—resides in the " manage versions " functionality offered by Google Drive that allows users to upload and manage different versions of a file, as well as in the way its interface provides a new version of the files to the users. Logically, the manage versions functionally should allow Google Drive users to update an older version of a file with a new version having the same file extension, but it turns out that it's not the case. According to A. Nikoci, a system administrator by profession who reported the flaw to Google and later disclosed it to The Hacker News, the affected functionally allows users to upload a new version wit

Google today published a blog post recommending mobile app developers to encrypt data that their apps generate on the users' devices, especially when they use unprotected external storage that's prone to hijacking. Moreover, considering that there are not many reference frameworks available for the same, Google also advised using an easy-to-implement security library available as part of its Jetpack software suite. The open-sourced Jetpack Security (aka JetSec) library lets Android app developers easily read and write encrypted files by following best security practices , including storing cryptographic keys and protecting files that may contain sensitive data, API keys, OAuth tokens. To give a bit of context, Android offers developers two different ways to save app data. The first one is app-specific storage, also known as internal storage, where the files are stored in a sandboxed folder meant for a specific app's use and inaccessible to other apps on the same

Internet-connected devices have been one of the most remarkable developments that have happened to humankind in the last decade. Although this development is a good thing, it also stipulates a high security and privacy risk to personal information. In one such recent privacy mishap, smart IP cameras manufactured by Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi found mistakenly sharing surveillance footage of Xiaomi users with other random users without any permission. The issue appears to affect Xiaomi IP cameras only when streamed through connected Google's Nest Hub, which came into light when a Reddit user claimed that his Google Nest Hub is apparently pulling random feeds from other users instead of his own Xiaomi Mijia cameras. The Reddit user also shared some photos showing other people's homes, an older adult sleeping on a chair, and a baby sleeping in its crib that appeared on his Nest Hub screen. It appears the issue doesn't reside in Google products; instead, it c

Besides rewarding ethical hackers from its pocket for responsibly reporting vulnerabilities in third-party open-source projects, Google today announced financial support for open source developers to help them arrange additional resources, prioritizing the security of their products. The initiative, called " Patch Rewards Program ," was launched nearly 6 years ago, under which Google rewards hackers for reporting severe flaws in many widely used open source software, including OpenSSH, OpenSSL, Linux kernel, Apache, Nginx, jQuery, and OpenVPN. So far, Google has paid hundreds of thousands of dollars as bounty to hackers across the world who helped improve the overall security of many crucial open source software and technologies that power the Internet, operating systems, and networks. The company has now also decided to motivate volunteer work done by the open source community by providing upfront financial help to project teams, using which they can acquire addition

With its latest announcement to increase bug bounty rewards for finding and reporting critical vulnerabilities in the Android operating system, Google yesterday set up a new challenging level for hackers that could let them win a bounty of up to $1.5 million. Starting today, Google will pay $1 million for a "full chain remote code execution exploit with persistence which compromises the Titan M secure element on Pixel devices," the tech giant said in a blog post published on Thursday. Moreover, if someone manages to achieve the same in the developer preview versions of Android, Google will pay an additional $500,000, making the total to $1.5 million—that's 7.5 times more than the previous top Android reward. Introduced within the Pixel 3 smartphones last year, Google's Titan M secure element is a dedicated security chip that sits alongside the main processor, primarily designed to protect devices against the boot-time attacks. In other words, Titan M chip

Mobile carriers in the United States will finally offer a universal cross-carrier communication standard for the next-generation RCS messaging service that is meant to replace SMS and has the potential to change the way consumers interact with brands for years to come. All major United States mobile phone carriers, including AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, and Sprint, have joined forces to launch a new initiative that will replace SMS with RCS mobile messaging standard . What's more? The initiative is also working with its carrier ownership group and other companies to develop and deploy the new RCS standard in a new text messaging app for Android phones that is expected to be launched in 2020. The goal of this joint venture , dubbed the Cross Carrier Messaging Initiative (CCMI) , is to deliver the GSMA's Rich Communications Service (RCS) industry standard to consumers and businesses on each of the four carriers, both in the United States and globally. "Efforts like

Google has finally agreed to pay $170 million fine to settle allegations by the Federal Trade Commission and the New York attorney general that its YouTube service earned millions by illegally harvesting personal information from children without their parents' consent. The settlement requires Google to pay $136 million to the FTC and an additional $34 million fine to New York state for allegedly violating the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) Rule. The COPPA rule requires child-directed websites and online services to explicitly obtain parental consent before collecting personal information from children under the age of 13 and then using it for targeted advertising. However, an FTC investigation [ PDF ] against Google's video service for children, called YouTube Kids, revealed that it had illegally gathered kids' data under 13. The data also includes children' persistent identification codes used to track a user's Internet browsing hab

Google today announced a new initiative—called Privacy Sandbox —in an attempt to develop a set of open standards that fundamentally enhances privacy on the web while continuing to support a free, open and democratic Internet through digital advertisements. A lot of websites on the Internet today, including The Hacker News, rely on online advertisements as their primary source of funding to operate and keep their professionally created content open and freely accessible to everyone. However, with the evolution of online advertising, the targeted advertisement technologies have become too much invasive because of involved intrusive practices and more prudent approaches to accurately curate users' personal information, thereby raising serious privacy concerns among Internet users. In its latest blog post , Google acknowledged that ad tracking is "now being used far beyond its original design intent," but also highlights that unplanned attempts to address privacy con

Update — With this month's patch Tuesday updates, Microsoft has finally addressed this vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2019-1162 , by correcting how the Windows operating system handles calls to Advanced Local Procedure Call (ALPC). A Google security researcher has just disclosed details of a 20-year-old unpatched high-severity vulnerability affecting all versions of Microsoft Windows, back from Windows XP to the latest Windows 10. The vulnerability resides in the way MSCTF clients and server communicate with each other, allowing even a low privileged or a sandboxed application to read and write data to a higher privileged application. MSCTF is a module in Text Services Framework (TSF) of the Windows operating system that manages things like input methods, keyboard layouts, text processing, and speech recognition. In a nutshell, when you log in to your Windows machine, it starts a CTF monitor service that works as a central manager to handle communications between all c

If you're using Chrome on Android, you can now sign-in to your Google account and some of the other Google services by simply using your fingerprint, instead of typing in your password every time. Google is rolling out a new feature, called " local user verification ," that allows you to log in to both native applications and web services by registering your fingerprint or any other method you've set up to unlock your Android device, including pins, pattern or password. The newly introduced mechanism, which has also been named "verify it's you," takes advantage of Android's built-in FIDO2 certified security key feature that Google rolled out earlier this year to all devices running Android version 7.0 Nougat or later. Besides FIDO2 protocol, the feature also relies on W3C WebAuthn (Web Authentication API) and FIDO Client to Authenticator Protocol (CTAP), which are designed to provide simpler and more secure authentication mechanism that sit

Are you using an Android device? Beware! You should be more careful while playing a video on your smartphone—downloaded anywhere from the Internet or received through email. That's because, a specially crafted innocuous-looking video file can compromise your Android smartphone—thanks to a critical remote code execution vulnerability that affects over 1 billion devices running Android OS between version 7.0 and 9.0 (Nougat, Oreo, or Pie). The critical RCE vulnerability (CVE-2019-2107) in question resides in the Android media framework, which if exploited, could allow a remote attacker to execute arbitrary code on a targeted device. To gain full control of the device, all an attacker needs to do is tricking the user into playing a specially crafted video file with Android's native video player application. Though Google already released a patch earlier this month to address this vulnerability, apparently millions of Android devices are still waiting for the latest A

Earlier this month, The Hacker News covered a story on research revealing how over 1300 Android apps are collecting sensitive data even when users have explicitly denied the required permissions. The research was primarily focused on how app developers abuse multiple ways around to collect location data, phone identifiers, and MAC addresses of their users by exploiting both covert and side channels. Now, a separate team of cybersecurity researchers has successfully demonstrated a new side-channel attack that could allow malicious apps to eavesdrop on the voice coming out of your smartphone's loudspeakers without requiring any device permission. Abusing Android Accelerometer to Capture Loudspeaker Data Dubbed Spearphone , the newly demonstrated attack takes advantage of a hardware-based motion sensor, called an accelerometer, which comes built into most Android devices and can be unrestrictedly accessed by any app installed on a device even with zero permissions. An

In April this year, a software update from Google overnight turned all Android phones , running Android 7.0 Nougat and up, into a FIDO-certified hardware security key as part of a push to encourage two-step verification. The feature made it possible for users to confirm their identity when logging into a Google account more effortless and secure, without separately managing and plugging-in a Yubico's YubiKey or Google's Titan key . "FIDO security keys provide the strongest protection against automated bots, bulk phishing, and targeted attacks by leveraging public key cryptography to verify your identity and URL of the login page, so that an attacker can't access your account even if you are tricked into providing your username and password," Google said . Android's security key feature until now was only compatible with Bluetooth-enabled Chrome OS, macOS, or Windows 10 devices over the Chrome browser. However, the latest update from Google now allow

Google has reportedly suspended all businesses with the world's second-biggest smartphone maker, Huawei, and revoked its Android license effective immediately—a move that will have a drastic impact on Huawei devices across the globe. Revoking Android license means Huawei future smartphones will no longer have access to Android updates and apps like Gmail or the Play Store, as well as Google technical support beyond services that are publicly available via open source licensing, Reuters report. Why? That's because last week, U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order declaring a national emergency banning foreign companies—over surveillance fear—from doing telecommunication business in the United States without the government's approval. About the executive order, White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders said in a statement that President Trump "has made it clear that this Administration will do what it takes to keep America safe and prosperous, an